Intro
The story of the tobacco shopkeeper who stole a scratch and win from a poor, defenseless elderly woman and fled is now known to everyone.
In this article, it is certainly not my intention to analyze and comment on the details of the incident. On the contrary, I would like to use this news to reflect on the topic of “scratch and win” and on the methods of prize collection.
A scratch and win can be seen as a bearer bond, a kind of briefcase full of cash, anyone holding it could be the owner. This is a typical example where we underestimate the role of a third party that stands between a winner and the prize.
When we scratch a ticket and discover that we have won, we must necessarily hand it over to a third party who verifies its validity. And if this person, like the tobacco shopkeeper in this case, were to claim ownership of the winning ticket when they receive it?
This reflection is certainly not an attack on tobacconists or intermediaries in general, or a warning not to trust anyone. It simply aims to draw attention to the concept of trust.
This is because when a winning scratch and win is presented anywhere for redemption, the winner is identified as the bearer. The principle is paradoxically similar to cash:
- Who can say that a stack of banknotes belongs to Tizio or Caio?
- Who can object if someone hypothetically presumed to be a thief of the ticket presents themselves with a winning scratch and win?
Unfortunately, the answer is no one!
Blockchain for a better world At this point, three specific questions come to mind:
How could this process be improved to make it impossible for anyone to steal a winning ticket from the rightful owner? Can blockchain be the right tool? What would happen if the woman, when buying a scratch and win, could mark the ownership of the ticket indelibly at the moment of purchase? Let’s analyze a possible alternative process.
Let’s imagine for a moment that scratch and win tickets are digital: the normal and consolidated action of purchasing a ticket by the woman would, in this case, be accompanied, in a totally automated and consequent way, by a transaction towards the system that issues the tickets themselves.
Does it seem complex? It’s actually not: the woman simply purchases the ticket and it is the underlying technological system that generates and manages all the “technical” actions, allowing the woman to purchase and “sign” the scratch and win with the same ease as sending a message with WhatsApp.
By doing so, the system that issues the tickets would automatically transfer the ownership of the potentially winning ticket to the woman’s wallet, waiting to be “scratched.”
Now, let’s imagine that that specific ticket is the lucky one.
I won’t dwell on the obvious fact that there would be no need to go to the tobacconist to collect the prize because, being on the blockchain, a smart contract could transfer the prize directly to the woman’s wallet.
If we wanted to preserve the ritual of going to a retail outlet to receive cash, I imagine that, at least for small winnings, the woman would never have to hand over the ticket to anyone, because the value of the win is as if it were already registered to the winner, transforming a “bearer bond” into a registered title.
How can we make this possible?
Affidaty has developed a system of Sovereign Digital Identity (4rya.io), which authenticates all actors that can interact with the blockchain. Speaking at an alphanumeric level, each actor that interacts with the system is identified by a key and must authenticate themselves before performing any action.
I won’t go into technical details in this article, but it should be noted that there are many users who can perform actions within our ecosystem.
I, Riccardo Setti, can perform an action; an IoT sensor can perform an action; a robot can perform an action; a smart contract; an artificial intelligence system; and so on.
We have created a digital registry for any type of device, be it human, software or hardware. The applications are endless: think of a scratch card with a wallet that autonomously pays the rightful winner.
I could go on listing tangible examples, but I want to go back to the context of the tobacco shop with our elderly lady who wants to buy a scratch card.
With our blockchain, the lady digitally signs the ownership of the card at the time of purchase, and the card will always recognize her as the legitimate owner, unless other instructions are given by the rightful owner.
Clearly, Affidaty has given a digital identity to a scratch card, and this is what is currently possible with current technology. It would be useless to illegally appropriate a blockchain ticket because at the time of redemption, the ticket will always recognize its actual owner, and the procedure is verifiable by anyone.
This news story perfectly represents how blockchain can be truly useful even in a seemingly trivial process like scratching a ticket. A simple case in which technology, with all its fascinating characteristics, solves a non-trivial problem in a few simple steps.
Who knows if someday this technology will penetrate so deeply into everyday life that even the elderly lady will use it without realizing it, by scanning the ticket with her own smartphone.
Technology is a value when it involves everyone, especially the weakest parties.
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